Turbulent atmospheric conditions are a special concern to aircraft because of the potential for passenger injury and aircraft damage. Consequently, avionics systems have been developed to alert an aircraft pilot when potentially turbulent conditions have been detected nearby. For example, current weather radar systems indicate regions of nearby weather conditions with a range of several colors, such as green, yellow and red, which indicate increasingly hazardous conditions. Regions where potentially turbulent conditions have been detected have been depicted with the color magenta. However, most turbulent regions are adjacent hazardous weather regions that are displayed as red areas. Because the human eye tends to merge magenta and red and to de-emphasize the magenta, a weather display utilizing such a color scheme may be very difficult to interpret by a pilot. One solution may be to use a different color to represent regions of turbulent conditions, but most current display systems are not designed to present colors other than black, green, yellow, red, and magenta on weather radar displays, even though the radar itself is capable of requesting additional colors.
A further difficulty with known weather displays is that turbulence is identified with a single color with no consideration for the intensity of the detected turbulent conditions. For example, slight turbulence may cause discomfort to passengers in an airplane, while intense or severe turbulence may damage the aircraft and injure the passengers and flight crew.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide a representation of turbulent weather conditions on an avionics display by which areas of turbulence are readily detected.
It is also an object of the invention to provide such a representation of turbulent weather conditions with colors used in current weather display protocols.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a representation of turbulent weather conditions that differentiates between regions of slight turbulence and regions of intense or severe turbulence.
A feature of the invention is a multi-tiered approach to the representation of turbulent weather conditions by speckling the display with magenta spots in regions of slight turbulence, increasing the density of the speckles as turbulence increases, and displaying a solid magenta object or icon in regions of severe turbulence.
An advantage of the invention is rapid and accurate identification by a pilot of nearby turbulent weather conditions.